DCrais: At Innovation Summit, James Carville highlights public education reform,then complains it costs him $15,000 yr to send his child to Newman...James Carville, Paul Pastorek, Garland Robinette all tout public education in #nola, but all send their kids to Newman #hypocrisy

liprap @DCrais: And where are your young 'uns going to school, sir?

(The answer was public school...among New Twitter's nifty improvements is the ability for a user to delete any of his/her tweets at any time, not just in the first five minutes of the life of a tweet. DCrais took advantage of that.)

bmockaveli: "I think...a year from now people will be asking What oil spill?'-Ross Baker Rutgers pol scientist http://n.pr/arPKwT --ON WHAT PLANET????

I'm still poring over this Orion magazine article by Terry Tempest Williams. There's a lot in there, as she made it a point to go to the places affected by the BP oil disaster between April 20th of this year and the day the well was officially capped. I hope she makes it a point to return.

A sampling:

“So what’s the story that isn’t being told?” I ask.

“Two things: how much oil actually has gone into the sea and the amount of dispersants used to make it disappear,” she says.

“The workers are getting sick with contact dermatitis, respiratory infections, nausea, and god knows what else. The BP representatives say all it is is food poisoning or dehydration. If it was just food poisoning or not enough water, why were the workers’ clothes confiscated? As we say in these parts, Answer me dat!

“I never really got nervous until I got a call at nine-thirty on a Sunday night from the BP claims office telling me to back off. But I’m speaking out. I kid my friends and family and say I’ll leave bread crumbs. The other day, two guys from Homeland Security called to take me to lunch. I’m a chef. They tried to talk food with me, to cozy up and all, and one of them told me he was a pastry chef.” Margaret shakes her head. “But I knew what they was up to, I’m not stupid. They just wanted to let me know I was bein’ watched.”

“Here’s the truth,” Margaret says, now emotional. “Where are the animals? There’s no too-da-loos, the little one-armed fiddler crabs. Ya don’t hear birds. From Amelia to Alabama, Kevin never saw a fish jump, never heard a bird sing. This is their nestin’ season. Those babies, they’re not goin’ nowhere. We had a very small pod of sperm whales in the Gulf, nobody’s seen ‘em. Guys on the water say they died in the spill and their bodies were hacked up and taken away. BP and our government don’t want nobody to see the bodies of dead sea mammals. Dolphins are choking on the surface. Fish are swimming in circles, gasping. It’s ugly, I’m tellin’ you. And nobody’s talkin’ about it. You’re not hearing nothin’ about it. As far as the media is reportin’, everythin’s being cleaned up and it’s not a problem. But you know what, unless I know where my fish is coming from, I’m eatin’ nothin’ from here.”

Margaret and I sit in silence. I am suddenly aware of the shabbiness of the neighborhood, the cracking paint on the wooden slats, the weariness of the ivy in this dripping heat.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I haven’t cried in a long time. I’ve been tough, I’ve been holding it all together, but it breaks me up.” She looks at me with unwavering eyes, “Have you read ‘Evangeline’ by Longfellow?”

I can’t speak.

“Read it. Read it again,” Margaret says to me. “It’s our story as exiles. If I wasn’t speakin’ out about this, I’d be havin’ a nervous breakdown. I’ll tell you another thing that nobody is talkin’ about. At night, people sittin’ outside on their porches see planes comin’ into the marshes where they live, and these planes are sprayin’ them with the dispersant. That’s the truth. But hey, we’re Cajuns, who cares about us?”

She leans forward in the heat as the pitch and fervor of frogs intensifies. “We might not be the most educated people schoolwise, but we know more about nature than any PhD. We know. We know what’s goin’ on.”

Friday, October 15, 2010

Confession: I am a former crystal growing fiend and a lifetime lover of geodes, ever since I saw the half of the massive amethyst geode my parents got to accent their den and said, "How does nature do that?" Thanks to a nifty kit, we made the geode half pictured above in a couple of weeks and the second half is growing even as I type this. What is nearly as enthralling to the little guy is the booklet that came with the kit describing how crystal growing in space gives humankind such nifty things as much more symmetrical crystals of silicon that can be used in the computers like the one you're reading this post on. Just my way of saying go to Maitri's nifty fundraising page for funding low-income science classrooms and give the kids something that won't turn them into science dolts. Plus, it's a great way to round out Earth Science Week.

The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Media Panel that went on last week, featuring The New York Times' reporter on the South Campbell Robertson, American Zombie's Ashe Dambala, and The Gambit's Kevin Allman was filmed as well, and that film is now up. Go watch.

the audit pointed out payroll and tax issues in both. Who was on the board????? As of 2008, they had $47. See here.

Gill pratt gave care unlimited (mose's charity $218,000

Richmond gave Scholarship Foundation of Sigma Lamba a phi a $227,000and N.O. Community Enhancement $183,000 andRay avenue baptist church got $50,000 from him.

Swilling gave $112,000 to La. Community Developer

Willard Lewsis gave $468,600 Family Advocacy Newtork (FAN)!!!

It is no wonder the city looks like shit!! Everyone gave $ to these little groups that mostly used the money to keep their lights on rather than make a meaningful impact on the city.

Disgusting!!!!!!!!!!

This is the story that is bigger than Cedric Richmond or, indeed, this year's Congressional race...but it does not excuse him or the Democratic Party entities in this city or this state just because it happened six to ten years ago and everybody was doing it. This speaks to how broken our government is at all levels, and to how it has hurt us all.

“It is very puzzling to the many citizens who worked for two years – at the request of the City Planning Commission to develop the New Orleans Citizen Participation Program – that a City Council member (Jackie Clarkson) would direct the Planning Commission to ignore their work.”

Looks like Jackie is just trying to keep some lights on, to me, but so many sockets need replacing. In fact, there needs to be a complete rewiring. Get with it, councilwoman.

You, too, liberal party entities. The tone-deafness to what the community wants and needs is astounding.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

It's nearing the end of fall break for the kiddo, and the living with him is quite the adventure.

Best way to bribe him into cleaning his room, without him erupting into "I'm too tired" or "I heard a strange noise in my room; I'm frightened" or"___________________ (fill in your favorite excuse)" is to predicate being able to see his floor on his getting dessert. He'll do anything for dessert. I'd pass that on to his teachers at school, but they'd most likely be afraid of the possible sugar rush effects that would come later in the day, so dessert only works at night, because I really don't mind if he talks my ear off 'til pajama time. The latest tales have been all about Norman the lone wolf and his escapades as the alpha of his own pack. Exhortations to the little guy to write his stories down or at least draw some pictures fall on deaf ears: he is thoroughly steeped in an oral tradition of his own making.

His talk continues on shortly after he wakes, if he doesn't have his nose in a book for an extended length of time. Yesterday it included props at the breakfast table - a small wooden crane he'd found when he was cleaning his room became an oil rig that fell off the edge of the table after a blowout. "Where'd it go?" I asked him. "Deeeep into the water," he said in an ominous tone, alerting me to the fact that the table was a now-blown-to-hell platform, and the space all around it was the Gulf - which, in imaginary world terms, would mean we were now walking around in air tainted with oil. Great thought to have at 8 in the morning.

Then, on the way to his mini-camp, the little guy asked as we passed Sophie B. Wright School, "Mom, a lot of brown people go there, don't they?"

"Yes, they do, honey."

"Why is that?"

"Too many people have it in their heads that it is somehow an inferior school, because they associate it with the brown people - and too many people think that brown people are inferior, which they are not. At all."

"And you should know, 'cause you're going to school with brown people," I said. "Are they any different from you just because their skin color is different?"

"No, they're not," he said, and we got out of the car, a slight contemplative look on his face until he got to the camp room. On to the new day...but knowing him, the kid'll be asking me about it again, and who knows when.

All of this before 9 AM.

How do you explain to a seven-year-old the centuries of prejudice that leads up to his observations that not everyone is treated equally? Because I try and I feel like I'm younger than he is, that I'm ashamed of the human race that we're both a part of, and that I, too, need something like dessert as a motivator for at least touching upon why things are so screwed up for us socioeconomically.

Update, 11:30 AM: Just got informed by Adrastos that Solomon Burke has passed away. Can't find the recent "I Need Your Love In My Life" that he did on video, but this one he did with the Blind Boys of Alabama is also pretty damn good. Rest in peace, king of soul.

Saturday, October 09, 2010

I ran into it many times - and still do - over the course of all this time I've been blogging.

Campbell Robertson commented on it at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities panel I attended Wednesday night. It's tough not to get caught up in it when everyone else around you is. It's one of the reasons why most of us live here, and it has its strengths - keeping a dialogue going with ourselves as New Orleanians kicks ass sometimes. It can be liberating when we don't care too much about what the world outside of this city thinks, and it can help band people together at times when the rest of the world is a nasty, crushing weight...

...but then there are the brick walls of progress that must be addressed. Progress that mistakes the new for the better. Progress that thinks what came before it is nothing but trash that must be discarded. Progress that leaves living, breathing, fellow human beings behind in its obliteratory quest for a higher plane of some sort. Progress that says root causes don't mean much. Progress that does not learn....and prides itself on it.

Part of why all of the recent hubbub over charter schools is so overwhelming to me at this moment in time is because there are occasional confluences of cracks in the progress machine that leave us reeling from what they expose, and this is one of those confluences. Sure, maybe it's a movie about education in which, allegedly, not a single teacher is spoken to that sets things off - but there have been many, many smaller fissures that have widened the gaping hole that Waiting for Superman seems to have opened up.

My mind explodes. The amazing disappearing and reappearing Brentin Mock article is simply helping prop open the chasm I see at this point. We all know in our bones something is wrong, but most of us think these are simply some kinks that must be worked out of the mighty Progress Machine. But these are much worse than that.

They're ghosts, I tell you.

And it's tough to get over a haunting. Because it's impressed into our gray matter. And we haven't even fully figured out how that works yet.

Under IDEA, all public schools must implement an Individual Education Plan (IEP) for each special-needs student before taking punitive measures. However, suspension and expulsion rates of these students are shockingly high in NewOrleans: overall, almost a third of the city’s 4,500 special-needs students have been suspended by the Recovery School District, the entity created by the state to take over failing NewOrleansschools. Specific RSD schools such as Sojourner Truth Academy and NewOrleans College Prep Charter Academy have suspended more than half their disabled student populations—53.8 and 52.2 percent, respectively, according to the Louisiana Department of Education’s special education Performance Profile. They are not anomalies, either. At least four other RSD charters suspend their special-needs students at three to four times the rate that their general-education students are suspended. The statewide average for suspensions of students with disabilities was 16.4 percent in the 2008-09 school year; RFD suspended 26.8 percent of its students with disabilities that year. In Baltimore, a city frequently used as a comparison with NewOrleans because of its similarity in terms of student population, 13.5 percent of disabled students were suspended in the 2008–09 school year.

The data further suggest that when not suspended, disabled students aren’t getting the education they deserve, either because teachers aren’t working the IEPs or because they’re not identifying children who may suffer from learning disabilities. Perhaps as a consequence, only 6.4 percent of students with disabilities in the Recovery School District graduated in the 2008–09 school year, while 37 percent of them performed “well below grade level” and 50 percent failed to complete school altogether. In Baltimore, public schools graduated 24.2 percent of their special-ed students with a diploma, while 33.5 percent dropped out in 2007–08. St. Louis, another city with a similar student profile, graduated 29.5 percent of its disabled population, while 31.5 percent dropped out in 2008–09.

Which raises the question: does the much-touted academic progress of NewOrleans’s post-Katrina charters come in part because special-needs students are being weeded out? Certainly, charters appear to be enrolling fewer than their fair share of special-needs kids. The average school in NewOrleans includes a disabled-student population of about 9 percent. Overall, 7.8 percent of charter-school students are disabled. That’s not significantly lower than the city average, but when you look at which individual schools have the lowest percentages of disabled students, almost all of them are charters. In fact, four of the highest-performing RSD charterschools in terms of school-performance scores have some of the lowest disabled-student enrollment figures in the city: Dr. Martin Luther King CharterSchool for Science & Technology, 3.29 percent enrollment; KIPP Believe College Prep, 5.41 percent; KIPP Central City Primary, 6.67 percent; and Martin Behrman Elementary School, 7.31 percent.

RSD Superintendent Paul Vallas, who led school-choice systems in Chicago and Philadelphia, responded to the special-ed discrimination complaint by saying it’s “off base.” He told the Times-Picayune that a third of his schools are “outstanding” on the issue, a third are “getting there,” and another third “need to make improvements.” Shirley, whose organization counts about 90 percent of Louisiana’s charterschools and all of NewOrleans’s charters except one as members, concedes that there are “unintended consequences” when instituting a new system.

Andre Perry, CEO of a cluster of schools under the Capital One–University of NewOrleansCharterSchool Network, echoes Shirley’s explanation. One of his schools, Pierre A. Capdau CharterSchool, has just 3.52 percent enrollment of students with disabilities. But Perry says the problem is a lot more complicated than schools neglecting special-needs obligations.

“The ultimate problem is that there are not enough resources in the system,” said Perry. “There is no one entity trying to get the schools, stakeholders, activists, and lawyers together to argue for greater funding for special-needs kids, and that’s one of those areas where it will take a citywide effort, especially in a city like NewOrleans, where such a great percentage of students are considered special needs.” Actually, the percentage of public-school students in NewOrleans considered special needs is pretty low: just 8 percent. In Baltimore, the percentage of special-needs students was 15.3 percent in the school year 2008–09, while in St. Louis, the percentage was 17.4. NewOrleans special-ed advocates say the city’s numbers are undercounted, especially given the trauma of Katrina. The SPLC legal complaint accuses NewOrleans charters teachers of not doing “child finds”—proactively identifying children who may have disabilities, as mandated by IDEA.

NewOrleans has benefited from extra federal funding provided to help rebuild its school system after Katrina. But a lot of that was one-time money, and the federal spigot is closing. The charters in NewOrleans will have to figure out very soon how to financially sustain themselves without federal grants. A major issue they’ll have to confront is how to pay for special-education services, considering that they appear to be already underserving their students in that area.

For that, Perry and Shirley both agree that some centralization—or “voluntary collaborations”—will have to take place in areas such as special ed and enrollment. For example, instead of each of the charters having their own enrollment process, there would be one entity that coordinates enrollment for all. Charterschools that thrive on autonomy won’t like it, but it would allow for a more consistent approach.

Perry makes the point that the system should also reevaluate how it determines which students have special needs, and whether that process itself is sustainable or accurate. “A lot of special-education advocates have lost sight [of the fact] that it wasn’t that long ago that we were talking about the labeling of people,” says Perry. “Not long ago, we realized that not all of these black boys can have ADHD, and were asking why is it that there is such an overrepresentation of black kids with IEPs?”

“Specifically, that may be a problem nationally, but not in NewOrleans,” says SPLC attorney Eden Heilman, lead counsel on the complaint. As for the voluntary collaborations, “I think that is one possible solution, but I don’t think it should be limited to just special-ed students. That should be available for all students.”

One of the remedies the SPLC’s legal complaint requests is the appointment of a “special master” for NewOrleans’s charters and traditional public schools (public schools’ special-education services were no better before the storm than charterschools’ are now) who will, among other things, implement a system that helps identify children with disabilities, track how they’re being punished, and enforce IDEA compliance. The last one is particularly critical given that there are 435 Teach for America teachers and staff working in NewOrleansschools, many of them in charters. During teachers’ training, Teach for America doesn’t instruct on compliance with IDEA, says Kaitlin Gastrock, regional communications director for the organization. They “touch upon it” for special-education teachers, though. The failure to include this training may affect young teachers, who can’t comply with a law they don’t know about. Shirley and LAPCS have already hired consultants from the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice to come up with a new special-education plan.

“We have to solve it, and I think it’s doable,” she says, “but we are the only place that really is a system now of mostly charters rather than traditionally run public schools. So, while we can look at best practices elsewhere, we can’t just look off someone else’s paper and steal the answers.”

Brentin Mock is a NewOrleans-based journalist who regularly contributes to The Root and Colorlines. His reporting on post-Katrina affairs can also be read at The American Prospect, The Daily Beast, Next American City, and The Lens.

Once this gets settled, I'll have more on my take on this stuff...but for those who might be waiting on any sort of Superman to solve all our problems, I'll just hand that off to the Flaming Lips:

Update, 10/8/2010: G-Bitch has an email addy y'all might want to use to let Newsweek know how you feel. If social media could work for Diane Ravitch, it might at least get an explanation out of Newsweek.

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Zev Chafets' Members of the Tribe starts off with an anecdote told to him by members of a congregation that had a couple attending who, for all intents and purposes, seemed like they were going to convert to Judaism. After months of seeing the couple at services and other simchas (holiday and life cycle gatherings) at the synagogue, the pair suddenly dropped off the map, and congregants didn't know why. Then a synagogue member spied them in public, came up to say hello, and asked them why they weren't coming to shul anymore.

"We wanted to learn the secret," the couple said.

What secret?

"Of why you people are so rich."

They meant monetarily rich. Like one enters a synagogue and instantly finds the combination to Scrooge McDuck's money bin. Which is a complete load of crap.

In trying to become members of a religious community just for tips on financial security, that couple's actions were, at long last, just terribly, pathetically sad in retrospect.

What is making his question about Rick Sanchez's firing so sad is that it does reveal that, unfortunately, after all this time, being an "Other" still matters. If Sanchez were being fired because he was just a terrible journalist - which he is - things would be different. It seems, though, that how good a journalist you are has nothing to do with whether or not you get on cable news channels, or even the non-pay teevee channels, these days. News is entertainment now, and Sanchez's stunts - among them, having himself tasered, ostensibly for journalistic purposes - apparently appealed to CNN enough for them to give him his own show. What I am curious about now is what Sanchez's future holds...will he go the way of Don Imus, who was canned from MSNBC and from CBS Radio after his nasty comments about the Rutgers' women's basketball team (which, in a perfect world would be two strikes - against blacks and women - held against him forever) only to resurface on ABC Radio in the following year? That to me will be more telling than Sanchez's firing.

As to what is the process? How can someone be canned within a couple of hours for saying that their employer=Jews? How can another race, creed, gender, transgender, sexual orientated group or ethnic group get that kind of clout?

As a Jew, I wish I knew that combination. Really, I do. 'Cause I'd use it as a woman to get that kind of clout. I'd pass it on to the black majority of this city, and to the people trying to get Park51 fully realized, and to folks of the same sex who love each other deeply but can't get married, adopt children jointly, or even get on the same insurance policy. You're underprivileged and discriminated against for "reasons" not of your own making? I've got these numbers I need to give you...

Asking what is the process of turning prejudice upside-down and inside-out? is sad because it wonders, in desperation, when the rest of the world will catch up to its own words of enlightenment that have been repeated so often yet ring so hollow.

Actions are not yet in sync with the words. There is not yet a good answer.